“Why not? Is he married? Is he a felon? We don’t need to let that come between us.”
“He’s too similar to your exes. Robbie and—what was that guy’s name from college? The one who didn’t want you to meet his parents until after you’d gotten your teeth whitened?”
“Nick. So? It sounds like your friend’s my type,” Kelly responded.
“That’s the problem. Your type isn’t working.”
It was true that Kelly’s relationship history read like a warning label for women everywhere. Both Robbie and Nick, the college class president with the gargantuan list of extracurriculars, had looked good to Kelly on paper, but made her feel bad about herself in real life. Spotted in between were a few short-lived flings, if “flings” can describe a series of dignified lunch appointments with coders who ended each date with a hug as tentative as if she were an electric fence.
“You ended up miserable both times,” Gary went on. “I want you to have something better, not the same thing all over again. It’s not a good match.” He broke down the boxes and stacked them by the recycling bin. “Thanks for helping out today. I’m a new man without that wart.”
“Yeah, sure,” Kelly said, with the slightly deflated feeling that she was being dismissed.
On the ride home, she couldn’t help but wonder if she had just sealed her own doom again. She was sure that Gary was genuine about wanting the best for her, but she questioned too if hearing about her behavior on the date with Martin made him reluctant to burden any of his friends with her company. She already knew she was a mess. But was she that much of a mess that her own brother couldn’t recommend her? As she pulled into the parking garage beneath her building and shut off the engine, she wondered grimly if Caillou was single.
Back at work that week, Kelly sat in a room that was open, square, and full of lights: fluorescent ceiling beams, glowing computer monitors, and a bank of control panels with switches, knobs, and blinking indicators. Beside her was Dr. Masden, a psychologist whose black eyes angled up in a very attractive way that she would have seen if she weren’t nervously avoiding those eyes. Opposite them, an oversize monitor displayed a digital waist-up image of a being named Confibot. The image looked essentially like a man, sporting short, combed blond hair and a small-check plaid shirt. But where a human face should have been was a set of dotted lines over a blank white space: two oblong rounds for eyes, a triangle for a nose, a straight line where a mouth would go, really just the suggestion of features.
“We need to pin down his range of facial options before we can settle on a final set of features,” Kelly was saying to the psychologist. “Then we can start building him. So, say, what face should he make when he greets a user who’s just woken up?”
“A pleasant smile, I would think,” Dr. Masden answered.
“Well, yeah, but I need you to tell me exactly. Like, here.” Kelly scooted closer to the doctor’s computer monitor on the control panel, blowing up the diagram of Confibot’s head in front of him so that it was minutely imaged under a set of gridlines. “Show me specifically how his mouth should be positioned.”
“There’s no one way it should be positioned, Kelly. Human behaviors aren’t that precise.”
Kelly shook her head, clicking into a folder on her own computer to display tile after tile of saved files compiled from her own research and the focus groups and surveys that AHI’s marketing team had done. “This is my research so far on microexpressions alone. Human behaviors are totally precise.” She knew that her own instinct to apply a mathematical, logical viewpoint to everything in life was one of the things that made her so good at this job. It was essential to the physical building of a robot, to giving it hard skills, like teaching Zed how to walk, and it was why she had always chosen to stay more in the mechanical and electrical engineering lane at work, focusing on building the “body” of the robot, so to speak. Confibot was the first project she had led—the first time she was also in charge of the “brain.” Her concrete, analytical way of thinking had always worked before. Just because she was grappling with something far more conceptual didn’t mean she was about to change her methods now.
Confibot was also the highest-stakes project in her career thus far. Anita Riveras, AHI’s CEO, had tasked each of the engineers in her Consumer Products division with inventing a caregiver or assistant robot—one of the market’s hottest niches. In three months, their inventions would all be pitted against each other for investor funding. Kelly had decided to create the most believably humanoid robot of the bunch, capable of the most nuanced social interactions, based on the astounding body of research she had uncovered about the health and lifestyle benefits of companionship. If she could get Confibot just right, she knew she stood a real chance at winning this.
“There are very specific, scientific ways that people react to different gestures, expressions, tones of voice,” Kelly continued now.
“Well, how would you respond?” the doctor asked. “Think about what you would want in a robot who’s taking care of you and living with you. You shouldn’t discount your own instincts here.”
“Instincts may be your business,” she insisted. “Data is mine. The science has to be there to back up every choice I make.”
“Then I’m providing you my insights as data. I’m a trained psychologist,” Dr. Masden pressed. “I’m here to give professional guidance.”
“But that’s not good enough! I mean, not that your insights aren’t good,” she said quickly, turning to the doctor, hating the way she could feel her cheeks instinctively flush as she did. Frankly, the fact that AHI had brought in the hottest psychologist in Santa Clara County to assist her on the project was just rude. She had enough on her plate between working on Confibot and worrying about having to admit to her mom how the date with Martin had gone. Not to mention now needing to find another date on her own. For Kelly, social interactions with any element of uncertainty were a source of stress more than excitement. She was a woman who wondered what she had done wrong when the cashier didn’t wish her a good day.
She needed to get started on building Confibot’s physical model, but first she had to get past this task of designing his face and voice and mannerisms so she would know what to build. She needed to focus on facts, not Dr. Masden’s “insights.”
“The way that Confibot interacts with users has to be perfect,” she asserted. “There are already other caregiver and companion robots out there on the market. If we’re not the best, we might as well not be out there at all! And the only way Confibot’s going to be the best is if he’s the most realistically human.”
“Kelly, to replicate a human, you have to understand humans.”
“I do! Why do you think I took six semesters of biology in college? I understand how the human body works, how animal bodies work. I know how to translate those structures into mechanical form.”
“I’m not talking about the body.” The psychologist looked away for a second, pursing his lips as if searching for his next words. “Designing a personality is a nebulous thing, Kelly. You’re never going to get anywhere if you’re so tied down to the data. I’m only trying to say that you might want to approach this in a different way.” He put a palliating hand on Kelly’s arm. Instinctively, she jerked away and crossed her arms. Dr. Masden looked taken aback as he abruptly withdrew his hand. It seemed he hadn’t even realized he had put it there in the first place. “Sorry, I—”
“I won’t be approaching it that way!” Kelly declared. As soon as